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Chronicler of War Nears 100, and Counting

It was one celebrated photographer’s salute to another. With war photography in the news, wrote Bob Gomel of Life magazine, how about some recognition for Max Desfor of The Associated Press?

“Max was a great inspiration and mentor,” said Mr. Gomel, 80, of Houston. “He was a sweetheart, a gentle soul.”

Mr. Desfor had won the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for photography with his Korean War pictures, particularly the haunting shot of a bombed bridge crawling with refugees (Slide 1).

In 1958, he had offered Mr. Gomel a coveted job with The A.P’s Wide World Division. Mr. Gomel had turned it down for a career in feature photography. Whereupon Mr. Gomel became perhaps best known for his 1969 Life cover, shot from high above, of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s coffin ringed with mourners in the Capitol rotunda. He also photographed the Kennedys, the Beatles, Malcolm X, Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali), Mickey Mantle and Marilyn Monroe.

“Max is 98,” Mr. Gomel said, and was living in a retirement community in Silver Spring, Md.

He was wrong.

Mr. Desfor was actually about to turn 100, on Nov. 8, with a private celebration the next day in Washington. It got better.

According to The A.P., of the 180 staff members who covered World War II, Mr. Desfor was one of only two still alive. (The other was George Bria, 97, a vegetable gardener in Pound Ridge, N.Y., in Westchester County.)

Mr. Desfor, a widower, was more or less a newlywed. He and his widowed bride, Shirley, 92, married two years ago.

Nothing to do, then, but book a hasty visit to Maryland. Once there, we found Mr. Desfor to be spry and quick-witted, the once-black hair and debonair pencil mustache gone gray, but easily able to pass for three-quarters his age. He was happy to encapsulate a centenarian’s epic history, beginning a year before World War I.

But first, the apartment walls, with (naturally) his photos: the prizewinning bridge photo with the simple Pulitzer citation; the Enola Gay landing after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and the Japanese surrender aboard the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Mr. Desfor was there to memorialize that, too.

He grew up in New York at 112 East 119th Street near the railroad tracks along Park Avenue (Grand Central Terminal had opened nine months before his birth), the youngest of four boys and a girl born to an immigrant Russian-Jewish tailor and his Austro-Hungarian wife. Of the unusual family name he had only a theory: an Ellis Island functionary had garbled the father’s hometown, Odessa.

Max Desfor/Associated PressThe last tanks and vehicles crossed the Han River bridge before it was blown up. Jan. 4, 1951.

The family moved to Brooklyn where Max attended New Utrecht High School and, for a year, Brooklyn College, before dropping out because “I hated math.”

His brother Irving — known as Doc because he once intended to become a doctor — was working as an artist-retoucher at The Associated Press and invited Max to watch him work. By 1933, Max was hired as a “squeegee boy,” pulling the prints out of the hypo, rinsing them in water and hanging them up to dry. Soon he was running them as well to New York’s many dailies.

To augment his salary, Mr. Desfor bought his own 4-by-5 Speed Graphic and began taking baby portraits. The A.P. was also sending him out on emergencies, mainly fires. Finally, it promoted him to staff photographer, based in Baltimore. Within a year he won a transfer to Washington. Meanwhile, he had married a schoolmate, Clara, and in 1941, they had a son, Barry.

On a Sunday that December, Mr. Desfor was photographing a football game when loudspeakers began broadcasting urgent messages for colonels and majors to telephone their offices. Curious, he called in to The A.P. and was ordered, “Get in right away.” Pearl Harbor had been bombed.

He rushed over to the State Department, where he witnessed an astonishing sight. “Secretary of State Cordell Hull was berating two Japanese envoys sent to talk peace,” Mr. Desfor said. “He was really yelling at them.”

After capturing that moment, Mr. Desfor said, he raced over to the Japanese Embassy in time to see staff members there burning diplomatic papers. “One guy with a broom was chasing photographers,” he recalled. “When they ran, we took pictures. When he chased us, the others took pictures.”

Close to 30 with an infant son, he was turned down for Navy enlistment but instead joined Adm. Chester W. Nimitz’s fleet as a war photographer, ending up in the fighting on Guam and Okinawa. In early August 1945, he said, he flew on a crop duster for some aerial shots and touched down on Tinian.

“We were surrounded by officers who took the pilot and me for coffee and then told us to get back to Guam,” Mr. Desfor said. He had no idea why they were being hustled out. He later found, he said, that he had stumbled on one of the great secrets of the war: the Enola Gay was taking off early on Aug. 6 for Hiroshima, carrying an atomic bomb.

Afterward, he photographed the bomber’s return on Saipan (although an A.P. photo carrying his credit mistakenly places it on Tinian).

On Sept. 2, 1945, Mr. Desfor was aboard the Battleship Missouri photographing the Japanese surrender. Lots of other photographers were there too, including David Douglas Duncan, who caught a shot of Mr. Desfor, in khakis, camera held high, capturing the scene. On his wall now, Mr. Desfor has a print of that, too, inscribed, “For Max/Shoot!/Dave.”

Max Desfor/Associated PressNorth Korean civilians, loaded down with possessions, lined up to board a landing ship tank for evacuation from the Hungnam perimeter. Dec. 20, 1950.

After the war he remained abroad, covering the Japanese war crimes trials in Manilla and the Indonesian independence movement. In 1947, when Princess Elizabeth, later to be the British queen, was engaged to Prince Philip of Greece, Mr. Desfor was sent to Malta to interview her distant uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Viceroy of India. He pried out exclusive details, which he said left the rest of the press corps so angry they blocked transmission of his scoop.

His photo of India’s Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru became an Indian postage stamp. He was photographing an Indian child wedding in 1948 when Gandhi was assassinated 800 miles away in New Delhi. “I induced the maharajah to fly me back to Delhi,” Mr. Desfor said. “I caught part of the funeral procession. I made the parade and covered the cremation.”

When the Korean War started in 1950, he jumped into action with a parachute unit. By December, when the Chinese began a ferocious counterattack, he joined American forces fleeing south.

Mr. Desfor was outside Pyongyang in a jeep with Tom Lambert of The A.P. and Homer Bigart of The New York Herald Tribune when, he recalled, “All of a sudden I saw something peculiar.” A woman was walking on a ledge close to the Taedong River and he spied a ruined bridge bombed by American pilots.

“I saw a remarkable sight,” Mr. Desfor said. “All these people with their bundles, everything they could carry, were climbing over the girders. In the background I could see thousands more waiting to climb on the bridge to escape.”

It was freezing and he could hardly operate his camera through his thick gloves … but he got the shot. He sent the film out with another A.P. photographer. That and other photos like one showing two dead hands sticking up through the snow — grisly evidence of a North Korean massacre — won him the 1951 Pulitzer for photography. Mr. Bigart of The Herald Tribune (and later The New York Times) shared the international reporting Pulitzer with five other correspondents for their war coverage.

Mr. Desfor, meanwhile, continued to work out of Tokyo, traveling to South Vietnam to photograph President Lyndon B. Johnson’s trip to the war zone, and also to visit his son (Barry was serving as a helicopter pilot there). He retired from The A.P. in the 1970s and went to work for U.S. News and World Report as photography director until 1980.

In 1994, driving on the New Jersey Turnpike, he fell asleep at the wheel, crashing into a barrier. He suffered severe injuries and his wife Clara later died.

Seventeen years later, in 2011, he and a Silver Spring neighbor, Shirley Belasco, an accountant and cancer survivor who had been widowed for decades and had long been friendly with the Desfors, married. The groom was 98; the bride, 90.

They were at a loss to explain their longevity, except perhaps for a nightly preprandial Scotch or bourbon.

But there was no secret to his photography, Mr. Desfor told The Newseum, in Washington, in an oral history: “Shoot first and ask questions later.”